Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (39 page)

But now I want to shift into another direction, which completes his story. I never really completed it because I didn't think it would be necessary. But now I think it would be a good time to do that in what time remains.

The metal of these wrenches is so cold it hurts the hands. But it's a good hurt. It's real, not imaginary, and it's here, absolutely, in my hand.

-- When you travel a path and note that another path breaks away to one side at, say, a 30-degree angle, and then later another path branches away to the same side at a broader angle, say 45 degrees, and another path later at 90 degrees, you begin to understand that there's some point over there that all the paths lead to and that a lot of people have found it worthwhile to go that way, and you begin to wonder out of curiosity if perhaps that isn't the way you should go too.

In his pursuit of a concept of Quality, Phædrus kept seeing again and again little paths all leading toward some point off to one side. He thought he already knew about the general area they led to, ancient Greece, but now he wondered if he had overlooked something there.

He had asked Sarah, who long before had come by with her watering pot and put the idea of Quality in his head, where in English literature quality, as a subject, was taught.

``Good heavens, I don't know, I'm not an English scholar,'' she had said. ``I'm a classics scholar. My field is Greek.''

``Is quality a part of Greek thought?'' he had asked.

``Quality is every part of Greek thought,'' she had said, and he had thought about this. Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure.

Ancient Greece. Strange that for them Quality should be everything while today it sounds odd to even say quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place?

A second path to ancient Greece was indicated by the sudden way the whole question, What is quality?, had been jolted into systematic philosophy. He had thought he was done with that field. But ``quality'' had opened it all up again.

Systematic philosophy is Greek. The ancient Greeks invented it and, in so doing, put their permanent stamp on it. Whitehead's statement that all philosophy is nothing but ``footnotes to Plato'' can be well supported. The confusion about the reality of Quality had to start back there sometime.

A third path appeared when he decided to move on from Bozeman toward the Ph.D. degree he needed to continue University teaching. He wanted to pursue the enquiry into the meaning of Quality that his English teaching had started. But where? And in which discipline?

It was apparent that the term ``Quality'' was not within any one discipline unless that discipline was philosophy. And he knew from his experience with philosophy that further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term in English composition.

He became more and more aware of the possibility that there was no program available where he might study Quality in terms resembling those in which he understood it. Quality lay not only outside any academic discipline, it lay outside the grasp of the methods of the entire Church of Reason. It would take quite a University to accept a doctoral thesis in which the candidate refused to define his central term.

He looked through the catalogs for a long time before he discovered what he hoped he was looking for. There was one University, the University of Chicago, where there existed an interdisciplinary program in ``Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods.'' The examining committee included a professor of English, a professor of philosophy, a professor of Chinese, and the Chairman, who was a professor of ancient Greek! That one rang bells.

On the machine now everything is done except the oil change. I wake Chris and we pack and go. He's still sleepy but the cold air on the road wakes him up.

The piney road goes upward, and there's not so much traffic this morning. The rocks among the pines are dark and volcanic. I wonder if that was volcanic dust we slept in. Is there such a thing as volcanic dust? Chris says he's hungry and I am too.

At La Pine we stop. I tell Chris to order me ham and eggs for breakfast while I stay outside to change the oil.

At a filling station next to the restaurant I pick up a quart of oil, and in a gravelly lot back of the restaurant remove the drain plug, let the oil drain, replace the plug, add the new oil, and when I'm done the new oil on the dipstick shines in the sunlight almost as clear and colorless as water. Ahhhhh!

I repack the wrench, enter the restaurant and see Chris and, on the table, my breakfast. I head into the washroom, clean up and return.

``Am I hungry!'' he says.

``It was a cold night,'' I say. ``We burned up a lot of food just staying alive.''

The eggs are good. The ham too. Chris talks about the dream and how it frightened him and then that's done with. He looks as though he's about to ask a question, then doesn't, then stares out the window into the pines for a while, then comes back with it.

``Dad?''

``What?''

``Why are we doing this?''

``What?''

``Just riding all the time.''

``Just to see the country -- vacation.''

The answer doesn't seem to satisfy him. But he can't seem to say what's wrong with it.

A sudden despair wave hits, like that at dawn. I lie to him. That's what's wrong.

``We just keep going and going,'' he says.

``Sure. What would you rather do?''

He has no answer.

I don't either.

On the road an answer comes that we're doing the highest Quality thing I can think of right now, but that wouldn't satisfy him any more than what I told him. I don't know what else I could have said. Sooner or later, before we say goodbye, if that's how it goes, we'll have to do some talking. Shielding him like this from the past may be doing him more harm than good. He'll have to hear about Phædrus, although there's much he can never know. Particularly the end.

Phædrus arrived at the University of Chicago already in a world of thought so different from the one you or I understand, it would be difficult to relate, even if I fully remembered everything. I know that the acting chairman admitted him during the Chairman's absence on the basis of his teaching experience and apparent ability to converse intelligently. What he actually said is lost. Afterward he waited for a number of weeks for the Chairman to return in hopes of obtaining a scholarship, but when the Chairman did appear an interview took place which consisted essentially of one question and no answer.

The Chairman said, ``What is your substantive field?''

Phædrus said, ``English composition.''

The Chairman bellowed, ``That is a methodological field!'' And for all practical purposes that was the end of the interview. After some inconsequential conversation Phædrus stumbled, hesitated and excused himself, then went back to the mountains. This was the characteristic of his that had failed him out of the University before. He had gotten stuck on a question and hadn't been able to think about anything else, while the classes moved on without him. This time, however, he had all summer to think about why his field should be substantive or methodological, and all that summer that is what he did.

In the forests near the timberline he ate Swiss cheese, slept on pine-bough beds, drank mountain stream water and thought about Quality and substantive and methodological fields.

Substance doesn't change. Method contains no permanence. Substance relates to the form of the atom. Method relates to what the atom does. In technical composition a similar distinction exists between physical description and functional description. A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassemblies and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence. If you confuse physical and functional description, substance and method, you get all tangled up and so does the reader.

But to apply these classifications to a whole field of knowledge such as English composition seemed arbitrary and impractical. No academic discipline is without both substantive and methodological aspects. And Quality had no connection that he could see with either one of them. Quality isn't a substance. Neither is it a method. It's outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn't method. It's the goal toward which method is aimed.

``Substance'' and ``substantive'' really corresponded to ``object'' and ``objectivity,'' which he'd rejected in order to arrive at a nondualistic concept of Quality. When everything is divided up into substance and method, just as when everything's divided up into subject and object, there's really no room for Quality at all. His thesis not be a part of a substantive field, because to accept a split into substantive and methodological was to deny the existence of Quality. If Quality was going to stay, the concept of substance and method would have to go. That would mean a quarrel with the committee, something he had no desire for at all. But he was angry that they should destroy the entire meaning of what he was saying with the very first question. Substantive field? What kind of Procrustean bed were they trying to shove him into? he wondered.

He decided to examine more closely the background of the committee and did some library digging for this purpose. He felt this committee was off into some entirely alien pattern of thought. He didn't see where this pattern and the large pattern of his own thought joined together.

He was especially disturbed by the quality of the explanations of the committee's purpose. They seemed extremely confusing. The entire description of the committee's work was a strange pattern of ordinary enough words put together in a most unordinary way, so that the explanation seemed far more complex than the thing he was trying to have explained. This wasn't the bells ringing he'd heard before.

He studied everything he could find that the Chairman had written and here again was found the strange pattern of language seen in the confusing description of the committee. It was a puzzling style because it was completely different from what he'd seen of the Chairman himself. The Chairman, in a brief interview, had impressed him with great quickness of mind, and an equally swift temper. And yet here was one of the most ambiguous, inscrutable styles Phædrus had ever read. Here were encyclopedic sentences that left subject and predicate completely out of shouting distance. Parenthetic elements were unexplainably inserted inside other parenthetic elements, equally unexplainably inserted into sentences whose relevance to the preceding sentences in the reader's mind was dead and buried and decayed long before the arrival of the period.

But most remarkable of all were the wondrous and unexplained proliferations of abstract categories that seemed freighted with special meanings that never got stated and whose content could only be guessed at; these piled one after another so fast and so close that Phædrus knew he had no possible way of understanding what was before him, much less take issue with it.

At first Phædrus presumed the reason for the difficulty was that all this was over his head. The articles assumed a certain basic learning which he didn't have. Then, however, he noticed that some of the articles were written for audiences that couldn't possibly have this background, and this hypothesis was weakened.

His second hypothesis was that the Chairman was a ``technician,'' a phrase he used for a writer so deeply involved in his field that he'd lost the ability to communicate with people outside. But if this wereso, why was the committee given such a general, nontechnical title as ``Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods''? And the Chairman didn't have the personality of a technician. So that hypothesis was weak too.

In time, Phædrus abandoned the labor of pounding his head against the Chairman's rhetoric and tried to discover more about the background of the committee, hoping that would explain what this was all about. This, it turned out, was the correct approach. He began to see what his trouble was.

The Chairman's statements were guarded...guarded by enormous, labyrinthine fortifications that went on and on with such complexity and massiveness it was almost impossible to discover what in the world it was inside them he was guarding. The inscrutability of all this was the kind of inscrutability you have when you suddenly enter a room where a furious argument has just ended. Everyone is quiet. No one is talking.

I have one tiny fragment of Phædrus standing in the stone corridor of a building, evidently within the University of Chicago, addressing the assistant chairman of the committee, like a detective at the end of a movie, saying: ``In your description of the committee, you have omitted one important name.''

``Yes?'' says the assistant chairman.

``Yes,'' says Phædrus omnisciently, `` -- Aristotle -- ''

The assistant chairman is shocked for a moment, then, almost like a culprit who has been discovered but feels no guilt, laughs loud and long.

``Oh, I see,'' he says. ``You didn't know -- anything about. -- '' Then he thinks better of what he is going to say and decides not to say anything more.

We arrive at the turnoff to Crater Lake and go up a neat road into the National Park...clean, tidy and preserved. It really shouldn't be any other way, but this doesn't win any prizes for Quality either. It turns it into a museum. This is how it was before the white man came...beautiful lava flows, and scrawny trees, and not a beer can anywhere...but now that the white man is here, it looks fake. Maybe the National Park Service should set just one pile of beer cans in the middle of all that lava and then it would come to life. The absence of beer cans is distracting.

At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with the small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, ``Don't go too close!'' and see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of ``Well, there it is,'' just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it's all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it's so pointed to. You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.